AIA Gold Medal to Richard Rogers

6. December 2018

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has named Richard Rogers, an honorable fellow of the AIA and senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in London, as the recipient of the 2019 Gold Medal, the AIA’s highest annual honor.

Rogers burst on to the architectural scene with the competition-winning design for the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1973, designed with Italian architect Renzo Piano, who was recipient of the AIA Gold Medal in 2008. Rogers took the high-tech approach of the Pompidou, with its external structure and exposed mechanical servies on the outside of the building, and applied it to Lloyd's of London, completed in 1986 in the City of London.

Although Rogers has been synonymous with a high-tech approach to buildings since, architects backing his Gold Medal nomination emphasize his environmental concerns and interest in cities. Moshe Safdie, 2015 Gold Medal recipient, wrote of Rogers: "He is the quintessential builder, committed to mastering the craft and technology of construction, harnessing it towards efficient buildings, and forging an expressive architectural language. Before it was fashionable, he was an environmentalist, who recognized early in his career the challenges of energy and climate, developing innovative solutions."

And Piano wrote: "Richard Rogers is a friend, a companion of adventures and life. He also happens to be a great architect, and much more than that. He is a planner attracted by the complexity of cities and the fragility of earth; a humanist curious about everything (from art to music, people, communities, and food); an inexhaustible explorer of the world. And there is one more thing he could be: a poet."

With the 2019 AIA Gold Medal, Rogers become one of those rare architects who have received just about every major architectural award given to individual architects. Previous awards include the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 1985 RIBA Gold Medal, the 2000 Praemium Imperiale Prize for Architecture, and the 2006 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from La Biennale di Venezia, among numerous others.